Brian Alvey : Latest News

You can't coach height

1103 days ago

Crowd Fusion needs to add three more solid developers ASAP just to work with our existing customers, but we hire really slowly because these aren't traditional developer jobs.

I mentioned that Craig posted to Authentic Jobs looking for developer talent. That got me thinking about the people we've worked with at Weblogs, Inc., Blogsmith, Netscape and Crowd Fusion who were a successful fit. Many of them had run their own personal consulting businesses or startups before they worked with us. That makes sense. If someone understands how to get enough done to pay their rent each month, how to land new customers while not disappointing existing customers, how to deliver projects on time AND how to do all of that from home, then they've probably got what we need.

Being a developer at Crowd Fusion is not like being a developer at a bank. Crowd Fusion is a totally virtual company. Everyone works from home. There are some downsides to this, like we don't go to lunch together every day and you can't have an assistant come and work out of your house while you're away on a business trip, but the good far outweighs the bad.

37signals talks about the dangers of interruptions in the workplace and even call it the interruption tax. I'm sitting at my desk, trying to get into a problem solving zone, and you come and stand in my doorway because you've got something you need to talk to me about right now. Those interruptions are a killer. Most of the things you want to discuss can wait. Send me an email or a text message. Open a ticket in Assembla and assign it to me. Type your question into our Campfire group chatroom. Just don't stand in my doorway and stare at me.

Growing Crowd Fusion

1103 days ago

Last year we shifted Crowd Fusion's direction and this year it's paying off. Plan A for Crowd Fusion was to be a publisher. We were building a powerful vertical publishing platform, so who better to put it to use than us? That would have been a great plan if the ad economy hadn't collapsed as we launched our first site. So we moved to Plan B: seeing what other companies can do with our publishing platform. We announced our open source beta program at TechCrunch 50 last September (video) and signed our first customer in November. We've also showed off Crowd Fusion on stage in NYC at NYTM and in New Zealand.

Crowd Fusion is in great shape right now. We have more than 1000 people signed up for our beta program and have been able to activate and work with 150 of them. We're working on deployments for three big customers. Our Obsessable and Super Eco sites are humming along -- making great showcases for Crowd Fusion and great labs for testing new platform features.

So what are we doing next?

Hiring developers
Activating more beta program members
Signing up more customers

Really we need to hire more developers before we can activate more beta program members and take on more customers, so hiring developers is our number one priority. I'm reaching out to everyone I know to see if we can't get a bunch of highly-qualified developers in touch with my CTO/partner Craig.

We posted the following job description (which has since expired) to Cameron Moll's great job board Authentic Jobs. Where else should we be looking?

Open Angel Forum: NYC

1139 days ago

On Thursday night I was a co-host of the first New York Open Angel Forum dinner with Charlie O'Donnell, Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley. More than a dozen great local angel investors networked and watched investment pitches over burgers and beer at Dogpatch Labs.

I was at the first OAF dinner in Los Angeles three months ago. Since then they've had events in San Francisco and Boulder and a bunch of the presenting companies have been funded. The NYC event went smoothly and the presentations from HD Cloud, MyNines, Aristotle Circle, Kodingen, Food52 and Up Next were fantastic.

Food52 would make a great Crowd Fusion app. HD Cloud would make a great Crowd Fusion plug-in. Kodingen would be a great way to edit Crowd Fusion sites from a web kiosk.

I'm looking forward to the next NYC OAF event. Our sponsors were actively involved and we got great feedback from everyone who attended. There are half a dozen little things we'll be changing for the next event to make it more efficient.

Thanks everyone!

Drinking with the stars

1173 days ago

Thursday night while I was waiting for a meeting at the bar at the Four Seasons hotel in L.A. to begin, I had a beer and did some star watching. I wasn't planning on star watching and maybe it doesn't always happen like this there, but it was three nights before the Oscars so I got a mini-preview.

First, Jeremy Piven was at the bar. He walked by me at one point and I said hi and told him I was still upset that they cancelled his show Cupid which ran for only 15 episodes more than a decade ago. He laughed and thanked me, but I'm sure he's happy he was freed up to work on Serendipity, Old School and Entourage.

Then Queen Latifah walked by. Wow. She looked like she had no makeup on and was easily the prettiest woman in the hotel.

Surprise!

1174 days ago

Friday night I flew home from L.A. to make it back in time for the birthday my wife and I share. I landed just after midnight and was wondering if since I was in the air between time zones when March 6 arrived that maybe I hadn't turned 40. No such luck.

I don't remember freaking out when I turned 30, but I definitely had a couple of troubled moments when 40 was approaching. Niki made sure all of that was far from my mind.

Virgin America was a let down

1178 days ago

Normally I fly from the little Westchester airport by my house, but they don't have direct flights to the west coast so I've been using JFK. I had heard great things about Virgin America from friends who were on their inaugural wifi test flight. My good friend Jason uses them and raves about them. So I was excited to try them out today.

My trip had a promising beginning. One of the pilots came out and introduced himself to nearly everyone at the gate and thanked us all for choosing Virgin America. Wow. One teenage girl was so overwhelmed by this that she started crying. Her two friends teased her when he left.

The purple lighting on the planes was cute. It was like being in a nightclub.

I paid the $15 for wifi and plugged my laptop into the outlet under my seat, but there was no power. Being the only passenger in my premium exit row I tried the other underseat outlet. It was also dead.

I asked the crew if there was some kind of trick I was missing. They said that the power rolls through the rows. That it's not always on in every row. That I should just wait. When I got to 21% battery remaining I let them know it wasn't going to happen.

They told me to try unplugging and plugging in again. No luck. They said there was a reset switch they'd try. Also no luck.

Laptop batteries don't last from NY to L.A. I'm no longer excited about my Virgin America flight home, but I will make sure I've got a fully charged battery.

Or maybe I'll just read a book.

UPDATE: My flight home was better. I had power for the entire flight and I got to unwind after a really good business trip with some music videos I would never have seen otherwise.

Open Angel Forum in L.A.

1222 days ago

In December I was lucky to be in town when Jason's daughter was born. That evening I was in their hospital room holding her and got to see her again later that week. I didn't make it to his wedding in Hawaii, but that was bigger by far.

Last week I was again lucky to be in town for another Jason Calacanis event, his Open Angel Forum. The five presenting companies were interesting and one was compelling enough that I'd want to invest in it and advise the team. One thing I liked about all of them is that they weren't all from the SoCal region. Investors follow people and markets, not geography.

The best part for me was having dinner with a smart group of investors. Some of them I already knew like Matt Coffin, Gordon Gould, Shawn Gold and Ron Conway. Some I followed on Twitter but hadn't met in person like Chris Sacca and Mark Suster. Some weren't on my radar at all, but are now like TechStars founder David Cohen, Shervin Pishevar and NY angel Jay Levy. Although Jarl Mohn was there and many people have told me I should meet him, there was so much going on I didn't get the chance. Next time!

Mark Suster did a much better recap of the OAF event, who attended it and what differentiates it from events where entrepreneurs pay to present to angels.

I definitely won't miss the NYC versions of these events.

StubHub Hubbub

1288 days ago

We had a great night last night. Niki said she wanted to get tickets for Rob Thomas at the Beacon Theatre in New York City months ago. We didn't get them when they went on sale and figured we'd either skip the show or buy some on the ticket reselling service StubHub. We've had a great experience with StubHub in the past, so a few weeks back we bought 5th row seats. We were excited.

The show started at 7PM and there were two opening acts we wanted to see but we hadn't eaten, so we had a quick dinner at the diner on the corner. At 8:10PM we walked to the show. As we passed an independent ticket salesperson (i.e., scalper) who was offering us a seat "upgrade" to the 13th row, I happily thought to myself "well for us that would be a downgrade." How cool.

Niki and I have seen Rob with Matchbox 20 at Jones Beach and at Madison Square Garden. I saw a solo Rob Thomas show at Live8 in Philly. Niki and I also saw a solo Rob Thomas show with Jewel at Jones Beach and we saw Santana at Jones Beach when Rob came out to sing his monster hit "Smooth." It's safe to say we were both looking forward to this show.

The Beacon scanned our tickets and told us our tickets had already been used once and we couldn't go in. We immediately realized that the person who printed these tickets at home made two copies: one for his friends and one to sell on StubHub. Or maybe he sold the other pair on Ebay.

We remained calm.

Going open

1304 days ago

In September at TechCrunch50 Craig and I got up on stage and told a couple thousand of our closest friends -- and tens of thousands of our closest friends who couldn't make it to SF so they watched on ustream -- that our Crowd Fusion platform is being released as an open source project. Unlike the hour-and-a-half episode of This Week in Startups that I was on, this was a six minute presentation (video here) with two minutes of questions from the panel of expert judges. It was a blast being on stage and having people come up to us afterwards with feedback and questions. I definitely need to go to more events and do more speaking!

After a whirlwind tour of Crowd Fusion's features, we gave out the URL for registering for our beta program. We had 500 signups in the first week and we've got about 700 total now. We are managing the beta applicants using our own CMS as a CRM system.

The first round of developers has had access for a few weeks now. The second round is getting access later today, now that most of our documentation has been written. We are going slowly, taking our time with each new user, answering questions about the platform and helping get sites built. "Concierge" is a pretty accurate description of this process. We'll do a few more rounds of access and then release Crowd Fusion publicly some time in early 2010.

Bands of color

1319 days ago

On the way to school this morning, "Under the Bridge" came on the radio and I asked my boys to tell me who the band was. Usually, they pass these music tests on the first or second attempt. They both love the song "Snow," so I figured they had a good chance of getting the right band for this one.

My 6-year-old's first guess was Green Day. I said that was close and this is a band with a color in the name. I figured with that clue they'd nail it on the second try.

My 4-year-old: "Pink?"

"Nope. This is a guy singing."

My 6-year-old: "Maroon 5?"

Wow. I wasn't expecting that one. "No."

My 4-year-old: "Black-eyed Peas?"

Again, I was stunned. "No."

I didn't realize they knew so many bands with colors in the name. Now I was getting worried they'd start rattling off bands they couldn't possibly know like Deep Purple, James Brown, Pink Floyd, Whitesnake and the Indigo Girls and completely blow my mind, but my 6-year-old saved the day with "Red Hot Chili Peppers!"

I love taking those boys to school.